Contemporary fiction. Ethics. Literary criticism.

The Inadequacy of The Novel (Mediation as Infinity

“….the idea of infinity is transcendence itself, the overflowing of an adequate idea. If totality can not be constituted it is because Infinity does not permit itself to be integrated. It is not the insufficiency of the I that prevents totalization, but the Infinity of the Other.”

Emmanuel Levinas – Totality and Infinity

Novels, the ones that are called literary by educational institutions, by the cultural studies and literature departments which reside within them, are constantly concerned by their own adequacy or validity. The death of the novel has become an irritating cliché for anyone trying to do resonant or resistant readings of texts in classrooms or readings groups, or for essays or theses. “We know”, they want to say. Better to say the novel has always been undead, existing in a state of not really existing, vampiric, choose your demonstrative-monster metaphor. I expect this is not my idea.

And a version of this declaration, or description, concerning the status of the novel came to mind when thinking about Levinas’s use of the term adequate. It is in the above quotation from Totality and Infinity that Levinas uses it to suggest the state of an idea which is coherent or complete. An idea founded in the discourse of reason, which can be thought or assimilated, thematized, by the totality of the self. But it seems that adequacy can have multiple senses above. That it is enough or satisfactory – or sufficient. Perhaps satisfactory is suitable given Levinas’s description of solitude as a form of personal enjoyment.

Adequation is also a kind of equivalence or making equal, a coming up to a necessary standard. And this starts me thinking about the “standards” of the literary novel, in the sense that it is both self-regulating and reliant on institutional regulation of its status and value. A novel attempts to be adequate to the very idea of what it means to be valuable/literary but at the same time wishes to critique or disturb the notion that there is a basic idea pertaining to what it is, or what it is meant to be. It wants to be adequate, to just about survive, its own literary status, and in doing so simultaneously display its own anxiety about its literary status. (Derrida’s in this paragraph haunting the vampire.)

Thus there are a bunch of things the novel can and can’t do. It can’t do reality – but it can try and succeed at mimesis. It can do the avant garde, but is hamstrung by a total avant garde novel. It can communicate and “move” people, but it is also complex and requires creative-critical readings. It can show us politics, but also we mustn’t use it to do politics.

It strikes me that digital mediation – chat logs of characters interacting, characters trying to google, characters at a screen – is something which shows up this necessary inadequacy of the novel. The literary needs to keep the digital as a text separate, in order to bolster its status as a singular form of textuality, to preserve the kind of temporary, quantum totality it need to simultaneously establish and not establish. At the same time, the literary novel has to assimilate different forms of mediation, as it has always done, in order to acknowledge its ability to try and do reality, or to maintain its own vitality.

But the act of digital mediation contains a difficulty which amplifies the novel’s inadequacy. It contains within it an encounter with exteriority, an infinity, with the volume turned up; mediation lit up with the problem of the other as the absent-but-present glow through the screen. The novel attempts to assimilate this, like other forms of textuality which were embedded in it from the beginning (letters, diaries, ships logs) but in doing so demonstrates an impulse to make it the same, the make it something the novel can deal with or thematize. The “infinity” presented on multiple levels by the event of digital mediation ultimately troubles the novel not only because it does not permit itself to be integrated, in that it is a formal and structural interruption. Its interrupting capacity is also the interruption of the problem of mediation which is the anxiety of the novel itself. It shows the literary a mirror, and within it is contained the necessary inadequacy of the form. It makes possible a reading of the anxious crisis of the novel.

This doesn’t kill the novel, put the stake through the heart of the vampire in its institutional coffin, but it sprinkles holy water around the castle as a constant reminder. To talk of the novel as dead is to claim that it was ever alive to begin with. And to suggest that digital textuality is “virtual” or easily reducible to a negative version of subjectivity is to engage in a line of thinking which denies the primordial status of mediation as a condition for all discourse. The recognition of this inadequacy, though, can make for the continuation of being for others, can drag the novel not from death into life, but make the novel live and die well.